Words swirled around his head like swift claws that tore deep into the flesh of his heart. No bottle could numb the coaxed and twisted furry that ate away at him. The fire in the hearth did it's best to warm what it could, though small wafts of snow melted against the flooring nearby. The night was still and crisp allowing those little pelts to dance down from the sky. Damien looked up sucking in a deep breath while peering at the moon, justifying his sour mood. The hole in the roofing was large enough to make it seem as if the moon had an audience of just him. The centre of the small world that had closed around him danced across his face and he looked to his heart.

Snapping creaks echoed their frustration as he shifted his weight upon the half broken wooden box he sat on. He looked at his arm studded in bits of metal noticing the shades of shadow that riddled his bulbous veins. They forked up his fingers to his wrist like lightning crackling to his elbow. It glowed against the fireplace, painting the walls in soft and strange colours. Waves like the ocean moved with each rotation of his forearm.

"What are you doing, Damien?" he asked himself.

"Yes," giggled an amused voice. "What ever are you doing?"

She brushed his side like a wistful cold breeze. Her image fluttered across the fire, materialising into an unnaturally perfect image entrenched in wisps of shadowed smoke. His lips hovered open and his gaze transfixed on her speckled eyes. Hints of dried tears glittered like crystals in the darkness, haunted reminders flashing like beacons of dread.

"I'm stewing," huffed Damien.

"Over trivial things, no less," she surmised.

"How do you do that?" he spat, bitterness seeping into his tone.

She tilted her head and swirled before the fireplace. The glow of heat and light filled her to an angelic visage. Otherworldly speckled jewels dotted what little of her neck was exposed like distant starlight. She adjusted the hood that hung at the back of her cloak allowing more of her to be seen.

"I know you," said Damien. "I swear I do, but everytime I just about part that obscure veil, who you are slips my attention."

"Who I was," she corrected. "Who I am now is more like an echo made whole or new."

They sat adjacent from one another, both slightly hovering in the air like a dream manifest. The space around them rippled and fussed, blipping changes to the structure and wall paint. Sunlit life stretched were broken panels of flowering had been then disappeared just as quickly.

"I can't stay long, so ask me, Damien," she stated.

"Who were you?" he begged. "You haunt me. You never stay, nor do you ever leave."

"I was someone you loved," she sighed.

Again, silence. A simmering abyss that followed the scraping of nails against stubble. Hers forayed against the wood, keeping in time with one another. A dance both elegant and perpetually distanced. Her faintness was genuine, phantasmal in her display of ignorance. Perhaps she cared not for the woes of this world or none could sway her thoughts back to this place. Both removed, yet still tied to this city in some way. 

"No, that person was much better," he said, shoving remembrance away from his brow. "She was everything for me."

"You think I can't feel that?" she asked, shifting to the front of his stupor. "Your thoughts are as clear as the night sky to me. I am no pale comparison. I am the afterimage, a fragment of what you had that evolved into its own making."

"It's own making?"

He bore into her eyes, past her thoughts to an essence much deeper. One reminding him of conversations with an old friend. Subjects which spoke of paradoxes, inevitabilities and fractured realities. Fires blazing into the night leaving a familiar taste upon his tongue. It was sweet and sickly both, leaving the empty space in his chest longing to be filled. She was her, in ways he couldn't truly comprehend. Harsh tonics always dulled the senses making him do things understood to be senseless.

"So, why do you haunt me?" he asked bitterly. 

"It's the same thing I ask myself, Damien. Why can't I escape you?"